Ben Fong-Torres remembers Dung, from his time with KFOG - including the trip to London - to his later podcasts. As his fiancée Judy Crum wrote, "He knows he was loved by his fans."
Mike Slavko, the hyped-up DJ best known to Bay Area rock radio fans as “M. Dung,” has died.
Mike (and trust me, he wouldn’t want to be referred to as “Mr. Slavko,” as obituary style dictates) passed away June 30 in a San Francisco hospital after suffering a variety of ailments. He was 59.
Soon after KFOG went from “beautiful music” to rock in 1982, program director Dave Logan tapped Mike, who was doing production work, to host the “Sunday Night Idiot Show.” He called himself “Dung Boy,” spun oldies and raved like a son-of-a-Wolfman Jack, sputtering inane phrases like “O-DEA?,” “YOW!” “Buh-DAY” and “Ay-WAY!”
“Dung was very excited about music,” Mike told The Chronicle’s Sam Whiting in a 2012 profile, “and I try to convey that to my listeners.”
He said he first did the “Idiot Show” on college radio in Allendale, Mich., in 1977.
Logan met him in Grand Rapids, Mich., where they worked at WLAV-FM, which aired the “Idiot Show.” It was, Logan said, “a free-form mixture of roots rock, immaculate soul and excellent oldies. It exploded from the radio with a funky groove and furious intensity.”
A year after his debut on KFOG, Mike also was given the morning show, with a name change to “M.,” minus the dung. “He swiftly became a big success,” Logan recalled. “No one who heard his show ever forgot him.”
After leaving KFOG in 1992, Mike revived his oldies show on other stations and online, at www.idiotshow.net. He also did podcasts, and his features can be found on Soundcloud.
But in recent years, he eschewed radio jobs (“I got tired of being fired for a living,” he told Whiting) and, living in an apartment in San Mateo, worked as a lab administrator. “I lead a very boring existence,” he said. Divorced, his only close family was his daughter, Antigone, a musician.
Then, he met and got engaged to Judy Crum in 2013. But, soon after, he began ailing. Since he didn’t have adequate health coverage, Crum started a GoFundMe campaign, and Mike filed reports. Early in 2016, after a hospital stay and visits with specialists, he wrote, “So far, Myelofibrosis (a blood cancer), rheumatoid arthritis (and) diabetes are the biggest issues, with a few smaller ones to boot.”
In midyear, he reported that he’d also with Mike, added loss of vision to Mike’s list of woes. He also had heart problems, but somehow remained cheerful. He posted a message: “Well, your old Dung Boy is happy to say he survived a heart attack. ... The cardiologist at Valley Care in Pleasanton did an amazing job. I am lucky to be alive.”
In the end, it was all too much. In her Facebook note to supporters, Crum wrote: “He knows he was loved by his fans, and was always surprised that people remembered him after all this time.”
Personal note: KFOG management apparently considered Mike better at being a personality than an interviewer, so when, in late 1986, the morning show went to London for a week of live programs, with a parade of rock artists visiting its pop-up studios at Capital Radio, program director John Rivers invited me along, to conduct the interviews. Our guests included John Entwistle and Kenney Jones of the Who, Ronnie Wood of the Stones, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, Sir Bob Geldof, Robert Cray, Rod Argent, Scott MacKenzie, Wang Chung and Maggie Bell. Truth is, M. Dung joined in on numerous chats and held his own. He loved music, and it showed. And the guests were amused by his verbal antics.
That week in London, working alongside “Scoop” Nisker, Kevin “the Rat” Radich, Rivers and producer Trish Robbins, remains a highlight of my radio career, with thanks to a certain Dung Boy.